A Collage of Chapbooks

Posted on May 23, 2013 by dubrava

for Jana Clark, who started it all

                                               …a glossy black seed…
                                                splinters open the way all things fragment
                                                into something fundamental.
                                                Either nothing’s sublime,
                                                            or everything is.
                                                                        Kaitlyn, from her chapbook
 

I attended the 2013 chapbook publication party. I had to do nothing but attend. It was good to see young teachers carrying on, tweaking a twenty-year tradition to make it their own. Two of the authors were in my first year writing class as 8th graders; four were in others of my classes before I retired. The remaining four never were mine. A school’s memory is subject to rapid turnover: soon I’ll know no one.

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Quotes: Arundhati Roy, Carl Sagan, the Bhagavad Gita, Charles Bukowski, Bob Hicok

A chapbook is a paperback booklet, usually of poetry or fiction. Producing one is the culminating project of the creative writing program at Denver School of the Arts. Eligible seniors create collections of their best work, illustrated with art and photography—their own and that of friends, family, and visual arts majors. They include favorite quotes, dedications and goodbyes. Fittingly so: they graduate days after publication.

Photos: sunlight coming through trees, bare branches of winter, oceans, deserts, roses, the New York skyline, crowds in gasmasks, birds in flight, moons

Moonlight spills across her face and makes her skin look like milk…

—Mickayla, from her chapbook

 

Dedications: to Mom, to Mom and Dad, to sisters and brothers, to family for love and support, to Dad for teaching me to drive a stick shift, to Mom for crying at the end of novels

Independently formed, each book furnishes a clear reflection of its author. That’s been so every year, but I’m always thrilled when it happens again, so one can look at a book and say, this is Indy, Shannon, Natalie, Charlotte.

Drawings: bird skulls, human skulls, pen & ink mermaids with fish skeleton tails, botanical charts of upper cretaceous fossils. Hearts—not the frilly Valentine kind—these are writers—medical cross-section hearts with sliced arteries

Young artists have always preferred their rainbows dripping blood. Examining the somber in your own life is something else. It’s satisfying to find them still doing that too.

We are probably the youngest people on Earth/who will remember the sound of skyscrapers/imploding,/and our generation will be called many names but for me/it will always be three numbers: 9.1.1.

—Sam, from his chapbook

Quotes: Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, William Carlos Williams, ee cummings, Barbara Kingsolver, Neruda, Nabokov

Parents bring more food to the potluck than anyone can eat and there’s cake, flowers and balloons: this rite is both a final requirement and a first graduation party. Alumni come, still supportive of their younger former classmates. This love of words is an enduring bond. Sophomores listen in awe to seniors reading and sigh, “I hope I can do a chapbook one day.”

…I want to believe/that if things naturally fall apart/some things are meant/to fall/together.

—Alex, from her chapbook

Dedications to friends: for sharing Russian lit, for being middle school bus buddies, for writing poems and stories together, for art school basketball, for jazz fusion, for helping me with math homework, for being my friend

This is what happens when you put the learning into the learner’s hands, when lessons in collaboration come naturally by working within budget and on deadline with artists and printers. There’s magic in a tangible result you hold in your trembling fingers and read from at a podium, saying, “this is mine, I made this.”

Quotes: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Isadora Duncan. The “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” speech from Apocalypse Now, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the litany of belief from Bull Durham, and still, after all these years: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Dedications to teachers: for making me believe in myself again, for dealing with my crap, for never letting me feel like an outsider, for helping me trust men again, for being like a father when mine wasn’t there, for being a mother, sister, friend

Standardized education and testing people, listen: I have seen the results of true education in six to twelve chapbooks a year for twenty years and those results cannot be measured by a test. This is the truth and I tell it slant, name it for you like a poet, the only way I know how.

Images: delicate drawings of jellyfish, photos of spiral staircases, of lodgepole pines being beetle-killed, of bare young backs with poems written across shoulder blades, interiors of old houses, houses falling into ruin

…the walls suddenly halt and meet open sky, startling to we who are used to completion; we are not sheltered here from the endlessness…

—Clarissa, from her chapbook

Quote: the last line from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

Dedications to friends: for inspiring me, for being my backbone, giving me a reason to go to school every day, for taking this big step toward adulthood with me

To teachers: for making me feel O.K. about being different, for giving me the love of poetry, French, history, literature, for understanding me, for hearing me, for noticing

                                    This is why
                                    we say goodbye
                                    by holding our words in our hands
                                    until they become wrinkled
                                    with unspoken conversation
                                    and we never let them go.
                                                                        Irene, from her chapbook
Posted in Education, Writing | Leave a comment

Learning (or not) from Experience

Posted on May 5, 2013 by dubrava

I had pain in my right shoulder, arm and neck, which surely, I told my husband, was due to a malignant tumor positioned beneath my armpit. Had to be. The pain had been there for weeks. I was quite pleased with myself for having waited so long to mention it.

Husband was unimpressed. “How are you using your mouse?’ he asked.

“My mouse? Well, I suppose…”

I was offended that Phil so readily dismissed my diagnosis. Then it dawned on me. Repetitive clicking and stabbing to eliminate Mahjong tiles or annoying frogs could be part of the problem. I didn’t admit that to Phil, of course. Mumbled something about adjusting my mouse position and left it at that. Fine. I’ll stop playing games for a while and see if the pain goes away. If not, it’s a tumor.

Easier said than done, it turns out. End of the day? Stuck on a problem?  Celebrating work finished? Avoiding starting new work? Playing a game had become the first response to all of the above. I blame the habit on my writing students. Constantly resorting to games worked for them: they wrote awesome stuff. Abstaining, I found myself pacing in my study, a tiny room. Not pretty.

I made a list of alternative activities: take a walk, do a house chore, read. In this house the TV does not come on until after 5 and I want to keep it that way. Eat something. No. Bad idea. Play games with the left hand, the right hand’s retarded brother. Doesn’t work. Left hand’s retarded, Jack. Within minutes I switch to the right without realizing it, wake from my game trance fifteen minutes later, saying, “wait, what?” The safest thing is to back away from all electronics until they are out of reach.

I noticed a cobweb in the corner of the entryway, behind the coat tree. Great, when game playing became irresistible, I’d do that. I made good progress on my translation until I came to a sentence that refused to resolve into meaning and translating it laboriously word by word, looking up even the words I knew, using four different hard copy dictionaries and three online ones, didn’t help. Argh! Why was I doing this stupid translation work anyway? I clicked the Mahjong icon, but in the nick of time remembered that entryway.

Moving the coat tree with its several coats topped by hats to the living room, I cleaned that corner, thinking about the translation project and what the hell the writer meant by that sentence and how today was supposed to be nice but now it’s cloudy and I should put on lights to see what I’m doing, turned around and gasped to discover, out of the corner of my eye, a tall man in a hat standing behind me.

Damn. Coat tree gave me a heart attack.

In the kitchen for more cleaning supplies, I remembered the sheets, put them in the dryer, heard my neighbor’s recycling cart rumbling in from the alley, went to get mine, saw that the bird feeder was empty and we might even have some precip coming the way it felt. It’d be nice if it was rain, but we never get rain. Snow or nothing, that’s Denver. I filled the feeder and paused to watch my resident quarrel of sparrows swarm the perches. “Ours! Ours!” They twittered vociferously, but the finches and chickadees patiently waited them out, got some too. Back in the house, I shrieked to find someone standing in the living room.

From his upstairs studio, Phil demanded, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

This did not satisfy him. Phil can be very suspicious. He came to the top of the stairs. I had to lie, manufactured a spider that took me by surprise to make my husband  go back to his room.

It’s pathetic when you scare yourself twice with a thing you put there to begin with. So perplexingly human, isn’t it, how we can’t seem to learn from experience? I suppose I could have been distracted by withdrawal from the games. If I were addicted to them. Which I’m not.

Like all that’s familiar, once the coat tree was back in its place, it stopped scaring me. I managed (mostly) to avoid repetitive motion games for two weeks. The pain in my arm may have lessened during that time, but it’s still there and I’m playing games again. Could be the games. Or it could be a tumor.

 

Posted in Humor | 4 Comments

Tidbits from the Travel Journal

Posted on April 22, 2013 by dubrava

New York, April, 2005. At MOMA, four panels by Kandinsky. The commentary says some interpret them as four seasons, but this was work “absolutely without descriptive purpose.” Considering that idea, I spot this woman and child, sit down to write with no purpose but description:

She’s thin, in her twenties, wears a stiff skirt splashed with pink and yellow flowers, cut full and short. The hem skims the tops of her white nylon knee-highs. Light cardigan of narrow blue and lavender stripes over a rumpled white T-shirt. She hoists her little girl to her chest. The child clasps her legs around her mother’s back. Her vinyl boots, bright orange with white polka dots, crunch her mother’s skirt. Mother and daughter are blonde, their straight hair pulled into hasty ponytails. The child sighs, rests her cheek on her mother’s shoulder. The mother stares intensely at the Kandinsky.

Querétaro, Mexico, 2006. El Cerro de las Campanas. A morning you only get above 6,000 feet—sweater cool, sherbet breeze, limpid sky. Jacarandas in violet fluted bloom. Indian laurel trees pruned into half-rounds line the path to the chapel, site of Maximilian’s 1867 execution. A towering black stone Benito Juárez commands the crest of the Hill of Bells, this quote carved into its base: Entre los individuos como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz. Juárez, an indio in power among españoles, must have felt that truth to its marrow. Between individuals as between nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.

California Zephyr to San Francisco, June, 2008 After Granby the conductor announces, “we just picked up the Colorado River and will follow it for over 200 miles.” Edward Hoagland says we go to water “for rest, refreshment, solace…In any landscape, in fact, a pond or creek catches and centers our attention as magnetically as if it were, in Thoreau’s phrase, ‘earth’s eye.’” So long as the Colorado runs beside us—wide, placid, perfectly reflecting the hills of the far side, or narrowing into rocks, descending, turning to white water froth—I seldom take my eyes off the bubbling swirls of its coppery current. A guy in the observation car says, “This is the river that made the Grand Canyon: give it a million years and it’ll turn this into one.”

On the mesa above Taos, June, 2009. On arrival we sit beneath the casita’s portico soaking up silence, except for the occasional car on the Valdez Rim Road, all of whom Phil says are driving too damn fast. He rants about the lack of wifi, which we were supposed to have, and grumbles over the quirky electric stove. But we watch the sunset change the color of cloud and mountain and valley below. Phil said the clouds and flanks of the mountain would turn rosy once the sun dipped into that pale blue mountain range to the west and they do. He goes out to take a photo of the only house on the cliff side of the road, our landmark for finding this place. “It’s not an interesting house,” I comment. “I don’t care about the house. I want the way the light is going to flare on its eaves.” And in a moment, those eaves glow as if with inner fire.

On the train to Chicago, August, 2010. At a small town in Iowa, an old guy in jeans and suspenders gets on with family, all of them obese. Talking about the flooding, he says, “our river’s been out of its banks for weeks,” points out the seed corn, how there’s three rows, then an empty row where the male plant was, which they remove after pollination. “And those,” he said, as some darker green came into view, “are soybeans. See how they’re a little burnt on top? That’s sudden death.” Later he saw some that looked good. “In another week they’ll start harvesting those and then they’ll be busy till the first freeze.” The commentary lasts until we reach outskirts of Chicago and run out of crops. Such knowledge is rare and archaic to me. How few of us these days know anything about what grows in a field.

Driving home from Kansas City, October, 2011. Near Limon I discover a butte I’ve never seen before pushing above the southwestern horizon, a great rock in the distance, defiantly solitary. But it doesn’t conform to butte shape. Finally the swelling flank makes me realize it’s Pike’s Peak, southern beacon of the Front Range. Then I-70 swings north, and as if balanced on scales, the rest of the range rises as Pike’s Peak sinks. By Deer Trail it slips out of sight and Mt. Evans lies ahead. That snowy high country, those powder blue foothills fill me with homecoming thrill every time.

Proust says a benefit of travel is “the temporary cessation of habit.” Habit puts us on autopilot, so we drive to work without knowing we’ve done it. Although I crave routine and sink into it like a warm bath, interrupting the everyday is a fine motivation for travel. Coming home, I continue to see—for a day or two—as I saw Pike’s Peak, with new eyes.

 

Posted in Travel, Writing | 7 Comments

A Tribute: Evelyn Blair Windom (1913 – 2008)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by dubrava

When we moved here in 1984, that period’s recession had dealt the neighborhood a gut punch. Houses were boarded up every other block and the house we bought had been one of them. We got it for a song. The area was shabby and predominantly black. Graffiti and shattered liquor bottles littered the alley. We loved our brick Queen Anne cottage, but weren’t sure buying it had been a brilliant idea. We were the only white people on the block and pretty uncomfortable.

Getting comfortable began with Ms. Evelyn Windom. It was April and I was in the backyard battling weeds. Yards were separated by chainlink fences then, so you could see into them. A clear, sweet voice called, “hello!” and I looked up to see a slender grey-haired woman two backyards away, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and garden gloves, waving her trowel. “I’ve been meaning to come welcome you to the neighborhood,” she smiled.

That moment shimmers in memory still. Everything had been looking ugly, she was a beautiful sight, and hers was the only neighborly gesture I’d received. Ms. Evelyn was my first friend on the block, steadfast to the end of her days. Weeks shy of seventy, she was two years into retirement, but hardly seemed retired. She came and went all week long, to lunch with friends, to Bible study, and on Sunday mornings I had the treat of watching her leave for church in her trim suits and snappy hats. She had a pale pink suit with simple A-line skirt that hit just at the knee, and I remember thinking, “damn, she still has really nice legs. I hope I’ll have such legs at that age.”

After years of front porch conversations, when I knew her better, I should have told Ms. Evelyn that story. She would have laughed and slapped her hand on her thigh. She would have loved it. After all, this was the woman who said, “makes me so mad, I could spit,” when she picked up fast food trash the high school kids dropped on her lawn. And then added, “you’ll have to excuse me now, I’m talking colored.” I told her a teacher I knew said she went to his church. She sniffed at his name and corrected, “He goes to my church, dear.” She’d taught Sunday school and managed the Altar Guild since 1942.

Ms. Evelyn Windom moved into her house in 1945, the year my husband was born, raised three children and buried her husband there. Her front yard had a parade of red and yellow tulips each spring, reliable as sunrise. She remembered the houses that stood across the street where Manual High School is now, remembered the big house to the north of us in “its glory days.” “A doctor lived there,” she told me. “They had peach trees.” Of the peach trees, one scraggly survivor remained when we came. Before it died, a seedling volunteer sprouted in my yard, a parting gift, so I now have one of those peach trees.

If Ms. Windom came to her door as I arrived from work, I knew she’d been watching for me and we needed to talk. Tactfully turning her back to the house in question, she leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “he moved out today.” “What!?” “I saw him throwing his clothes in the car.” Such business took time to sort out. We had to compare notes on all we’d heard. And of course, our opinions about the situation needed a generous airing.

For over a decade, Ms. Evelyn cared for her older sister with Alzheimer’s who lived across the alley. She walked over there several times a day, often with plates of food. Her brother or son mowed the lawn; other relatives pitched in. That family made it possible for the old woman to stay in her home long past when most would have resorted to a nursing facility.

Ms. Evelyn took in her troubled grandson from New York when she should have been enjoying retirement. Although he went to jail, struggled with addiction and caused her great worry, I never heard her say anything but, “my poor grandson: I’m praying for him.” He was a conflicted person, constantly trying and failing to change his life. He’d get a job and do well for months, then fall. He said, “Grannie’s the only one who never gives up on me.” I told him he was lucky to have her, couldn’t have done what she did, taking him back again and again, suffering his erratic behavior and unsavory friends. But Ms. Evelyn was a better Christian than most of us. Her grandson’s life ended too soon, tragically, and she was stricken by his passing.

One day I met her in the alley, both of us emptying trash, when she’d just come from a Bible Study group. “I’ve been thinking so much about Esther,” she ruminated. “What an amazing thing she did, putting her own life at risk to save her people.”

I only nodded, didn’t know about Esther, had to look it up. If I had known, I might have observed that Ms. Evelyn Windom’s service to people in her life had a lot in common with that story. She’d have told me that was some of my silly nonsense. I still miss her. It is April now again, the month I met her, the month she left us, and her red and yellow tulips again trumpet their bright glory in the front yard.

 

Posted in Neighborhood | 5 Comments

A Summary of “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” by Steven Brill

Posted on March 23, 2013 by dubrava

Introduction

A first in the history of Time Magazine, this single story—36 pages, 24,000 words—filled the feature section of the March 4, 2013 issue. It’s had plenty of press, but I know you won’t read it. I’m retired and it took me a week to read it. Still, it’s crucial stuff, so I’m attempting to summarize this thoroughly researched piece of investigative journalism. If it’s in quotes, those are Brill’s words. Otherwise, I’m paraphrasing and leaving information out like crazy. I’ve boiled it down to 1,665 words. Mr. Brill, my apologies.

“When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?” That question prompted Brill to begin his research. For seven months, he analyzed bills from hospitals, doctors, drug companies and every other player in the health care system; interviewed doctors, drug, hospital, Medicare and insurance administrators and collected patient stories across the country. The individual stories are gripping: read those, if you can, online. No room for them here.

Findings

“In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country…the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt ‘nonprofit’ hospitals into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives.”

Such hospitals dominate our economy—nearly 20% of our GDP goes to health care. Our taxpayer burden is greater than anywhere else on earth. We spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined, which include Japan, Germany, France, the U.K and Canada. “Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.”

Shocked by the $60 billion cleanup from Hurricane Sandy? “We spent almost that much last week on health care.” McKinsey research identified $750 billion in annual health care overspending. The health care industry wants to keep it that way, spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends lobbying Washington.

From the charts and graphs (of which there are many)

  • 62% of personal bankruptcy filings each year are related to medical bills
  • The lowest paid CEO on the list of 10 largest nonprofit hospitals earns $2,080,779
  • Of the countries that spend most on health care, we spend by far the highest per person and yet our life expectancy is the lowest in that group.
  • Our infant mortality rank is 50th in the world, nine spots below Cuba
  • One Nexium pill here costs as much as eight pills in France.

Surprise! Medicare works.

Brill’s investigation of Medicare shows an effective organization staffed by more people employed by private contractors (8,500) than government workers (700). Bills are generally processed within 30 days. The system is efficient, and 96% of doctors accept Medicare patients in spite of the discounted rates in part because they pay quickly.

“Medicare collects troves of data on what every type of treatment, test, and other service costs hospitals to deliver. Medicare takes seriously the notion that nonprofit hospitals should be paid for all their costs but actually be nonprofit after their calculation.” Besides direct costs, allocated expenses such as overhead, capital expenses, executive salaries, insurance, regional costs of living and even the education of medical students, are factored in. Even so, Brill finds, in one of many like examples, Medicare would have paid $13.94 for a hospital test billed at $199.50.

The almost poor—those who don’t qualify for Medicaid and don’t have insurance—are most often asked to pay exorbitant prices. Medicare forces discounts, as do insurance companies, so those with such resources are buffered. “If you are confused by the notion that those least able to pay are the ones singled out to pay the highest rates, welcome to the American medical marketplace.”

“The only players in the private sector who seem to operate efficiently are the private contractors working—dare I say it?—under the government’s supervision. They’re the Medicare claims processors…” Medicare’s total management, administrative and processing expenses amount to two-thirds of 1% of the amount of the claims, less than $3.80 per claim. As a comparison, Aetna spends $30 for each of its claims, about 29% of the amount of claims.

How Congress handcuffs Medicare

“Federal law restricts the biggest single buyer—Medicare—from even trying to negotiate drug prices. As a perpetual gift to the pharmaceutical companies…Congress has continually prohibited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)…from negotiating prices with drug makers.” A law passed by Congress in 2003 requires Medicare to reimburse for any cancer drug approved by the FDA, plus 6%. Most states require insurance companies to do the same.

This is the “comparative-effectiveness” debate that almost derailed Obamacare in 2009. The critics charged that Washington bureaucrats would dictate which drugs were worth giving to which patients and even which patients deserved to live or die. So comparative effectiveness was dropped. If research shows that Drug A for cancer, at $300 a dose, is just as effective as Drug B, at $3,000 a dose, Medicare can’t do a thing about it. Keeping comparative effectiveness out of Obamacare means we still pay way too much for drugs.

We also spend ridiculous amounts “on durable medical devices like canes and wheelchairs, in part because a heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25% to 75% more for this equipment than it would cost at Walmart.” Tests and equipment are similar cases. CT equipment pays for itself in a year if it does 10 – 15 procedures a day. After a year, every scan means pure profit, less maintenance cost. The U.S. does more CT tests per capita than any other country and pays much more for each test.

Possible solutions

Allow competitive bidding. Congress hasn’t allowed Medicare to drive down the price of durable medical equipment through competitive bidding, but did allow a competitive bidding pilot program that produced 40% savings. Medicare spends $15 billion a year on durable medical equipment. Competitive bidding could save us $6 billion a year.

Lower the age at which people can join Medicare. Medicare buys health care services at lower rates than any insurance company. The best way both to lower the deficit and help people save money would be to let near seniors join before 65. They could pay premiums based on their incomes and a higher proportion of their bills—say, 25% or 30%—rather than the 20% now required for outpatient bills. Adding younger people would lower the overall cost per beneficiary and reduce the deficit, because younger members tend to be healthier.

Tax hospital profits and place a tax surcharge on all non-doctor hospital salaries over $750,000. “Why shouldn’t those who profit most from a market whose costs victimize everyone else chip in to help?” Brill says it’s unlikely to happen: hospitals are often the most politically powerful institution in a congressional district.

Change the chargemaster, the infamous price list of products and services all hospitals use, which seems to be based in fantasy and results in drastic overpricing like a 10,000% markup on acetaminophen. $199.50 was the chargemaster price for that $14 test mentioned above.

Reduce drug prices to what they get in other developed countries. Save $90 billion a year.

Defenses for doctors. “Embarrass Democrats into stopping their fight against medical-malpractice reform and instead provide safe-harbor defenses for doctors so they don’t have to order a CT scan whenever, as one hospital administrator put it, someone in the emergency room says the word head.” Eliminating unneeded lab tests, CT scans and MRIs could cut more billions.

The core problem

You must have electricity and can’t go elsewhere, are stuck with a sole provider. Your health care situation isn’t much different. You have whatever insurance your employer chooses, can only use certain hospitals or doctors. Most of us “are powerless buyers in a seller’s market where the only sure thing is the profit of the sellers.” But unlike with the electric company, no regulator caps hospital profits. “Unless you have Medicare, the health care market is not a market at all. It’s a crapshoot.”

“The real issue isn’t whether we have a single payer or multiple payers. It’s whether whoever pays has a fair chance in a fair market.” We don’t have to scrap our system and aren’t likely to, but can significantly reduce the $750 billion we overspend. “Put simply, the bills tell us that this is not about interfering in a free market. It’s about facing the reality that our largest consumer product by far—one-fifth of our economy—does not operate in a free market.”

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) does good work around the edges of the core problem. It restricts abusive hospital bill collecting, forces insurers to explain policies in plain English, and puts the insurance umbrella over millions more Americans, a historic breakthrough. But nothing in the act addresses health care costs. Republican opposition eliminated comparative effectiveness, remember. Three of the best things about Obamacare, prohibiting exclusions for pre-existing conditions, restrictions on co-pays for preventive care and the end of annual or lifetime payout caps, will cause insurance premiums to rise. Obamacare changed the rules related to who pays for what, but hasn’t done much to change the prices we pay.

Conclusion

“We’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug or device consultants or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.”

Following the money shows that we’ve let the big health care moneymakers control the debate, keeping us from seeing the main issue: all the prices are too damn high.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Education, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Milkshakes and Missionaries

Posted on March 4, 2013 by dubrava

 

My stomach was doing flips. See, I know better than to have one of those Dairy Queen blizzard things. Knowing better never stopped anyone from doing what they want to do, however, and it didn’t stop me.

I’m a bit embarrassed by my occasional Dairy Queen cravings: in my mind, it’s sort of trashy, much like frequenting 7-11. I made an emergency stop at a 7-11 once with a friend who looked around and said, “Wow, we’re back in America now.” If you haven’t been to a 7 -11 for years and then go to one, you’d get that.

But I adore those overkill shakes that probably cause cancer and it was almost my birthday and I’m in complete denial about my dairy allergy. I do not have one. My stomach, however, wasn’t convinced. So I was grumpy when the doorbell rang, but luckily, I could see who it was and it wasn’t for me.

“Honey, the Jehovah Witnesses are here,” I shouted.

“Oh, great!” Phil replied and came rushing downstairs to open the door, cheat notes in hand.

I got out of the way and out of sight, always choose not to be involved in these things. I opened the medicine cabinet and stared at the possibilities: the idea of swallowing that poisonously pink stuff made my stomach flip again.

“Good afternoon! What can I do for you?” I heard Phil say. I could tell he was rubbing his hands together gleefully.

The Witnesses started on their prepared statement. In a few moments, Phil said, “tell you what. I’ll trade you copies of your scripture for mine, how’s that?”

The Witnesses stuttered.

I thoughtfully examined a bottle of Tums that expired in 2009. How much harm could it do? And those pain pills from my dental surgery two years ago. I kept them, because who knows when you might slice off a finger in the kitchen? I dropped both into the trash. Still nothing for my alarmed digestive system.

Phil was reading them his list of absurdities from the Bible. “Exodus 21:7 says I can sell my daughter into slavery. So do you agree with that? Well then, how can you believe some parts but not others? How do you decide which parts really are the word of God?”

My husband didn’t find these scriptures himself. He heard them on West Wing years ago. The embellishments were all his though. He loves this stuff. You should see him with the Mormons. He has the dirt on Joseph Smith. Tell you the truth, I feel sorry for the proselytizers when they come to our door.

I passed a pair of Mormon missionaries on my walk through the neighborhood a few days ago. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you know anyone who needs help today?”

Huh, I thought, interestingly oblique way to put it. I almost directed them to my house, but looked at their fresh young faces and relented. It would have been cruel.             “Nope,” I answered cheerfully, “don’t know a soul around here who needs help today.”

They gave me an odd look, but decided not to engage. Smart boys.

I wear dark glasses and a hat when we go to Dairy Queen. Trashy is different than working class, but who knows what people would think? There are Americas and Americas out there. I’m righteously proud of being working class. I even harbor enduring  resentment of rich people, an attitude that must be written into blue collar DNA. Class distinctions in America are as knotty as religious ones, everyone thinking their world is the One. An example of such differences was just beating a hasty retreat from my front door.

My stomach was still burbling unhappily. There wasn’t a damn thing in that medicine cabinet I could take. When I was greedily slurping that giant soft serve with chunks of fudge and caramel and nuts, I said to Phil, “it’s so worth it.”

Now, I’m not so sure. That’s life, ain’t it?

Posted in Humor | 7 Comments

On Reading

Posted on February 23, 2013 by dubrava

 

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

—Samuel Johnson

Many in education will frown at Johnson’s quote, as I would have as an English teacher. I made students read as a task and believed they profited from such reading, as did I, reading as a task in order to teach. Dr. Johnson was mistaken, but I appreciate the sentiment, because I’m retired now and may read what I like with no purpose in mind. It feels a bit decadent. A friend who retired from teaching before me said she was finally able to read in the afternoon without feeling guilty. I still don’t manage that most days, but my reading has expanded nonetheless. In the first two months of 2013, I’ve read:

            The Painted Alphabet: A Novel Based on a Balinese Tale, Diana Darling

            The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

            The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

            Manual para enamorarse, short stories by Mónica Lavín

            Notes from the Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys

            The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

            Maljuna Knabino, Agustín Cadena

None but the Spanish are new publications and except for them, the list is what happened to cross my path and hold my interest. The delightful Bali novel was a gift from a former colleague now teaching there. People have been telling me to read Joan Didion’s book for years. I was reminded of it by a Connie Willis interview in Talking Writing, an e-magazine. Thanks to Ms. Willis, I learned about Bennett’s witty, snack-size The Uncommon Reader in the same interview.

“Cloud Atlas” the movie led me to Cloud Atlas the book—a linking I usually do in reverse. Finishing it in December, I needed more David Mitchell immediately. Some writers affect me that way: I develop a craving for them. So I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s are the kind of novels that absorb me, linger hauntingly when I’m done, make airport waits and recovery from dental surgery bearable. Such are the comforts of reading by inclination.

In the reading as task category, the Spanish titles are by Mexican writers I’m translating. Reading in Spanish is not the effortless experience reading in English is. I stumble over unfamiliar vocabulary, or stop to ponder particular phrases, wondering how in the world I’ll render them in English. It takes a long time, but once I’ve translated one of these stories, re-reading it in Spanish becomes like reading something I wrote myself and have half-memorized.

Notes from the Hall of Uselessness is a chapbook in the Cahiers Series published by the American University of Paris. It contains two fine essays by Simon Leys, but I bought it for its pretty face, which arrested my progress in a Tattered Cover bookstore aisle. (Hello. Who are you?) According to the colophon, its text paper is Neptune Unique, dust jacket Chagall, and it’s set in Monotype Dante. It is also saddle-stitched properly, with thread. Such a book is a prime example of why I’ll never love e-books, although I read them on the plane. Oh, the tooth of the dust jacket, the elegance of the page design, the subtle chartreuse of small cap subtitles above black text! The chapbook’s title originates with Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi: “People all understand the usefulness of what is useful, but they do not understand the usefulness of what is useless.”

Maurice Sendak, explaining why he hated e-books, said, “It’s giving up a form that is so beautiful. A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.” Just holding this slender objet d’art makes me smile. May uselessness forever be cherished.

The Uncommon Reader posits the pleasant idea that Queen Elizabeth somehow becomes a reader in her old age. She has not read before, really, has had people to do that for her. In this fiction, becoming a reader transforms her as all who are devoted readers know it does. Her Majesty muses at one point, “I read, I think … because one has a duty to find out what people are like…” Before becoming a reader she’d been oblivious to people. Now she notices their behavior and moods. Reading offers vicarious intimacy with tribes other than your own, and hence, sensitivity to them. I’ve always thought we mostly bump about in discrete bubbles, unable to touch one another. Reading is a road through such isolations.

Partially raised in a small segregated Florida town, I had little contact with the black population and barely thought of them. They were beyond the glassy limits of my bubble. In 1959 at fifteen years of age I chanced into a second-hand store and found a faded copy of Richard Wright’s Black Boy. How’d I find such a thing in such a place? How’d I know to buy, for twenty cents, this treasure by a writer I’d never heard of? Fifteen, I walked out with that book in my hand and no idea how it would start fracturing my nascent worldview. I was blind and then, because I read, I began to see.

           

 

 

 

 

Posted in Education, Translation | 4 Comments

An Answer to the Question, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

Posted on February 4, 2013 by dubrava

On deadline, my rule is no internet until the work’s done. Sometimes I even observe this rule. This morning I took my second cup of coffee to my study and resisted email, a gateway drug for Facebook. I needed to revise two flash fictions I’m translating to meet a journal’s due date, a deadline circling ever closer above me like a condor.

It was one of those rare mornings when work went swimmingly. Looking out at a splendid blue sky, I promised myself a walk, imperfectly solved several thorny translation puzzles, input the results, composed a note in Spanish to Agustín, the author, and sent him the drafts. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice I had 34 messages waiting, nearly half of them from Facebook. It was after ten, but I had another task before break: finding a topic for my next blog. I clicked through my idea list for five minutes. Nothing inspired me. Showing my usual dedication to my craft, I promptly gave up and indulged in twenty-five sinful, fattening minutes of email and Facebook.

Yesterday evening, Sara described a Bali bike ride past cows and palm trees, family temples and black rock cliffs overlooking the ocean. Rain overtook her, she said, so torrential it was like riding underwater.

Sandy posted last night, describing a dinner of roast pork, sauerkraut and dumplings with Mile High Czech Lodge 432 at a restaurant in Denver. Dessert, of course, was apple strudel.

At one a.m. this morning, Amy concluded her last night at the Sundance Film Festival by seeing the Grand Jury Prize winner, “Fruitvale,” and reported that it was the best festival she’d seen in all her years of taking students there.

Two hours ago, Agustín, exhausted, posted a shot of the bright and cozy living room of his new Geneva flat, having just finished moving in.

Under an hour ago, Patti posted a frigid photo of thick snowfall in Gunnison, less than four hours from here and three thousand feet higher. I looked again at our clear blue sky and remembered that walk I promised myself.

In the 20 hours since I’d been on Facebook, any number of people changed their profile pictures, Shiloh declared she’d like to eat an entire chocolate cake, Sophia posted a story she wrote containing an exploding pony, and Emily wondered how long it takes for printer nozzles to clean. Brendan, ever helpful, commented that “nozzle” is a “pretty great word” and he may use it for his first child’s middle name. Various others of my former DSA students continued to follow their muses; Brett raising money in New York for a developmental reading of his musical, Jerod or Charlie always playing somewhere, Alexandra still dancing, Mica still singing, Mallory still costume designing, actors acting, writers writing, painters painting. It does their old teacher’s heart good.

The Democrats tirelessly continue to want my donation and in Florida my niece Kristen posted photos of her baby boy with the finger he injured yesterday neatly bandaged. Glad to know that turned out O.K. Daughter Snow put up a shot of the aggressively decadent cake her son—more importantly, my grandson—Shane made for her birthday. My neighbor announced an hour ago that there’s a mouse in the house and the hunt is on. By the time I saw it, nine people had already posted sage advice. “Please,” I wrote anxiously, “don’t chase it over here.”

But that walk. Outside, it was 58 degrees. I unzipped my jacket, hiked upslope and verified that, indeed, thick cloudbanks hung over the Front Range, the kind that mean business. By then, Gunnison must have been inches in white. Stitched to mountain peaks, the clouds looked stationary, but looks are deceiving. Down here in Denver, the sky was still blue, the sun warm on my face. I walked further than I’d planned, circled back to KJ’s for coffee and scones to take home and share with Phil. On his own deadline when I left, getting a newsletter to the printer, he sat at his computer with that “don’t even try to interrupt me” vibe emanating from his hunched back.

By 12:30 clouds made it over the mountains and wind picked up out of the north. By two someone in Arvada posted: “I smell Greeley.” And someone else: “Yep, snow’s a-coming.” By three I also could smell feedlots, but suspected it was Stock Show yards, also north of here, but nearer to hand. Our 60-degree morning dove to freezing and at four, it began to snow. That made it midnight in Geneva. Agustín and Viki have been long asleep, went to bed early after their day of moving from Hungary, but before they did, Agustín sent me a fast email about the flash fiction: los veo mañana. I’ll look at them tomorrow.

That’s plenty soon enough, because while I was walking in the spring morning that preceded this winter night, I got the germ of an idea for my next blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Humor, Writing | 6 Comments

A Whittier Walking Tour

Posted on January 24, 2013 by dubrava

                                    Through this broad street, restless ever,

                                    Ebbs and flows a human tide,

                                    Wave on wave a living river,

                                    Wealth and fashion side by side;

                                    Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.           

                                                                        —John Greenleaf Whittier                       

Denver’s Whittier Neighborhood is bounded by 23rd  Avenue on the south, MLK on the north, York to Downing east to west. Manual High School and adjacent Fuller Park sit near its center. My customary walk is a lopsided oval around the school. First I hike upslope to 26th and Williams, a high point. The intersection profits from the expanse of Manual parking lots and playing fields, allowing an unobstructed western view. Today, the foothills were ultramarine and indigo. Beyond them the high country shimmered white. Anchoring the northern edge of the Front Range, Long’s Peak made its height felt, more than seventy miles distant. Half its rocky peaks were swept bare of snow, a sign of our shortage. Standing there, I feel the rolling prairie beneath me, imagine how it looked, treeless and open, before we came, slow waves of sage-pocked land uncurling forever.

Traffic’s steady on 26th Avenue, a route to downtown. Frank’s Kitchen looked busy, two blocks east, my source of tasty, freshly made meals. A block south, KJ’s Coffee Shop on 25th is an impromptu office peopled with laptops. The clientele for both are mainly afoot, often with dog and baby stroller. Frank’s and KJ’s are recent improvements: for most of my years here we had nothing like them within walking distance.

I go south to 24th and then east for several blocks. Standing in the middle of the street at Race (I do so easily; there’s no traffic) I’m on the wide crest of a hill downsloping westward. From here the mountains rise above downtown’s skyline, Mt. Evans satisfyingly framed. In 1874, an advertisement for this area described it as “beautifully located, overlooking the city with a glorious view of the mountains.”

Looking west from such high points, the descent is gradual, leaving the length of 24th Avenue visible from Vine to the end of the neighborhood and the traffic light at Downing. The light, at that moment, was green. A long view down a street has always moved me, as though it were a sign that eventually we’ll find our way.

Most Whittier housing was built from the late 1880s to the 1920s. On my walk I pass Craftsman bungalows, Tudors, Dutch Colonials, Queen Annes and Denver Squares, red brick, blond brick, houses that have stood over a hundred years, rich with history. There’s a wraparound porch I like on 23rd and Race, and on High, a south-facing yard whose fence bursts with blue morning glories in August.

Twenty-third is a busy crosstown artery, so I return north to 25th, where the world is quiet, then west to Lafayette. Here the downslope flattens. The Front Range is still visible, but downtown blocks Mt. Evans. I’ve always resented those skyscrapers. There were less of them when I came here and I had better views.

In the 1920s, African-Americans began moving into the area, starting Whittier’s first turning, from white middle/working class to African-American middle/working class. It took thirty years, but by 1950, Whittier was 90% black. A color line ran down the alley between Race and High in the 1920s and African-Americans could not buy east of it. Well, they could, but when they did, the KKK bombed their houses. Another line cordoned the neighborhood at 23rd. Red-lining was an effective way to create ghettos: north-south and east-west demarcations forced African-Americans into limited areas. That the neighborhood was named for American poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892) was fitting. Popular in his time, his reputation as a poet has faded, but Whittier was an avid abolitionist, worked thirty years to end slavery.

On Lafayette, I walk north, passing a block of handsome two-story homes lined with tall old silver maples. Hundreds of silver maples planted in Whittier a century ago are ending their lives. In scattered efforts, they’re being replaced with lindens, swamp oaks, Norway maples and a dozen others. In a Whittier tree planting with Denver Digs Trees a dozen years ago, I helped plant a linden two blocks down, take pride in its now handsome height.

Turning east at 28th, I watch Flight for Life hovering over St. Luke-Presbyterian’s heliport, which barges above treetops to the south, along with the bright red cranes of the new St. Joe’s hospital. Skirting Manual, I enter Fuller Park.

Half a dozen dogs and owners are in the dog park like always. In the early 1980s, Fuller Park was home to drinking and dice. My black neighbors—except for a few Hispanics all my neighbors were black—didn’t let their children play there. The street divided school from park then, but that block of 28th was vacated in a school expansion and as a result, our block got quieter, the park nicer. The dog park was added. Now, young mothers push tow-headed children on swings. A bonus of art museum construction, fifteen crabapples thrive on the eastern side of Fuller, relocated from the strip park that was across 13th from the Denver Public Library.

Heading home, I remember my African-American neighbors who one by one moved away.

“Don’t leave me,” I pleaded with Bobbie, whose yard was radiant, and who I depended on for plant advice. She moved to a condo.

“This old house—I just can’t.” Freida said, and bought a new one in Aurora.

Elderly homeowners died and their families sold to developers who fixed and flipped and the new owners were usually white.

Twenty-five years ago, when I took this walk I saw mainly African-American residents. They had country habits, sat on their front porches in the evening, said hello as I passed, sometimes idled their cars in the middle of the street for a conversation with a friend out working in her yard. Mr. Henderson across the alley kept chickens, but in 1986 keeping chickens in the city was outrageous. Today those I’ve seen have been mainly white, jogging or working on their houses or patiently following toddlers’ slow progress on big wheels. We are all still “in the same quick current,” and Whittier is in the midst of another turning.

 

Posted in Neighborhood | 6 Comments

Nostalgia and The Hobbit

Posted on January 5, 2013 by dubrava

When Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in 2001 – 2003, we were beyond excited. We’d been young people who discovered the Tolkien stories. That others had done so before us was immaterial. We read them in high school or college, in the late 60s or early 70s, had Middle Earth posters on our walls. Tolkien’s books were emblems of our youth, which, by the dawn of the new century, lay as far behind us as The Shire.

But we weren’t the only ones excited about these film versions: the buzz was incredible, the ticket lines long. And in December 2001, we so needed that uplifting tale of good conquering evil. The Christmas season releases, one film at a time for three years, led to the establishment of a holiday tradition.

The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. The Two Towers, 2002. The Return of the King, 2003. Because it was winter break, we managed to assemble ten or twelve friends each time, and have dinner afterwards. A few had moved away and were in town for the holidays. A few were teachers and so on break. For three winters in a row we gathered happily to see loyalty triumph over betrayal, courage over fear, and spend time together in a way we rarely did anymore. We were mostly at busy points in our careers, had grown children. One or two of the grown children joined us.

We had sweet memories of those occasions and in the years since watched the films again over the holidays several times. The Hobbit, 2012, more than a decade later. We decided this thing we’d done so joyfully must be resurrected. Two of the original fellowship were in town for the holidays and that was a good start. But the elder wizard of our group died in 2004, and one pair now lived in India. Another has COPD and the evening was longer than her portable oxygen tank could last. She and her husband could not come. The grown children are scattered, have their own families. We assembled six, saw the film and had dinner, but it was not the same.

For one thing, we weren’t riding the same wave of thrilled reaction to the film. LOTR won 17 Academy Awards, was widely praised for innovative special effects. It was partly that which dazzled us in 2001. Now we’ve all seen lots of slick CGI and while The Hobbit’s effects were excellent, they’d lost the power to amaze us. LOTR was one film per book. The Hobbit is to be three films for one book. More than once, I felt conscious of overly extended scenes. One of our group said at dinner, “too many Orcs.” The restaurant was loud and our hearing not as good as it was a decade ago. I strained to keep up with conversations and was weary when it was over, my ears resounding as if they’d been boxed.

Nostalgia is a deceptive seductress. We remember the delights of times past without recalling their dark sides: the horror of 9-11; between one film and the next, learning of our friend’s cancer; other friends moving away. Those pleasant moments were real. They were good. But there’s no repeating them. To every season, its own sorrows, its own joys.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments